and WELI(960AM New Haven CT) carries Rush
his weekend review is playing now.
7
Not sure.
But after doing some digging into Walter Reed, which I thought was just a hospital, have found some interesting stuff about how unique it is and maybe there isn’t a better suited place where 45 could be “insulated” from vicious cold.
And with Q drought, I have got my high heel boots and shovel and I’m off to dig.
Building 54 is interesting.
Excerpts
On November 17, 2016, the U.S. Army transferred 11.85 acres of the campus to Children’s National Hospital.
The portion of the site that was transferred by the U.S. Army to Children’s National includes the facilities below. Children’s National is proud to build on the legacy of this historic site. While each is being fully renovated, we are using each facility for a purpose similar in intent to its original use.
Former Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (Building 54): Originally dedicated by President Eisenhower, it housed laboratories whose experts helped diagnose rare and complex diseases. Army scientists established an extensive biosample library—a valuable resource that led to many advances. The new use for this building is research-focused, including work focused on rare diseases originating in childhood.
Former U.S. Army Medical Ward (Building 52): Originally used by the Army as a medical ward, and more recently used to treat soldiers on an outpatient basis. This structure is now the only original medical ward remaining on the campus. Children’s National will use it for pediatric outpatient care.
Former Post Theater /Uniformed Services Medical School (Building 53): Originally used by the Army for educational presentations, Children’s National plans to restore this 300-seat conference theater for ongoing medical education sessions and community events.
Former Rumbaugh Garage (Building 3): This garage will continue to be utilized as a garage. The landscaping will be enhanced, with cultivation or replacement of the cherry trees that were previously a distinctive feature on the terrace level of the research building. The top level of the garage will host a solar array and generated power will be donated back into the power grid for distribution to low and moderate income DC residences.
https://devilofhistory.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/building-a-bombproof-institute/
Excerpts
Though a lot of locations in the Washington, DC, area were hardened to some extent or another, only one building was actually designed from the ground up to withstand a nuclear blast. It’s not one you’d think.
The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) traces its origins back to the establishment of the Army Medical Museum in 1862. Created to collect morbid anatomy specimens for the education of military doctors, the museum became a storehouse of pathology knowledge. Two of the museum’s pathologists were responsible for Abraham Lincoln’s autopsy. In 1888, it moved into a large Romanesque Revival building, which would be its home for more than sixty years. During the First World War, the museum provided staff to perform post mortem autopsies and created instructional photographs, films, and wax models for training both officers and troops. During the Second World War, it added support for scientific research and diagnostic assistance.
After a series of bureaucratic and legislative contortions far too complicated and dull to recount here, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center became the new home for what had now become the inter-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The Walter Reed hospital complex was an architectural gem, with more than a hundred rose-brick Georgian Revival buildings. As originally planned, the AFIP’s new home – Building 54 – would try to harmonize with the site in a very substantial six-floor, multi-wing building. The design was prepared by the Washington-area firm of Faulkner, Kingsbury, and Stenhouse, whose style has been described as “streamlined and Modern,” but using “traditional materials such as brick and grand, symmetrical landscaping and site planning to fit into the Beaux Arts context of Washington, D.C.”
At this point, the nuclear threat intervened. A 1951 presidential directive required that the new building be built to bomb-resistant standards. The results were somewhere on the thin line between genius and monstrosity. The blastproofing requirements meant the new building was massive, a vast rectangular slab with broad, thick walls of pre-cast concrete. There were no exterior windows in the main block, and every opening to the outside or the two small projecting wings (which did have windows) was closed by heavy, blast-resistant doors. The wooden forms in which the concrete was cast gave the walls a ridged, textured look. Standing aloof from the rest of the elegant Walter Reed campus, Building 54 was, to borrow (and maybe misuse) Vincent Scully’s term, a “sacred mountain” inspired by the Soviet threat.